The present invention relates to a process and an apparatus for the rapid rehydration of legumes and the like.
As is known, in the food-preserve industry, in order to rehydrate legumes and the like to be packaged, tanks are currently used, generally having considerable dimensions, in which the product to be rehydrated is immersed and has to remain in the water for a relatively long period of time, of the order of a few hours, so as to absorb the required amount of water.
Considerable productive disadvantages are usually encountered with this procedure, since it is necessary to provide a high number of tanks in order to ensure production continuity.
Moreover, the processing occurs discontinuously, since a large amount of product to be processed is accumulated at the end of the rehydration, followed by idle times which depend on the number of available tanks; the fact must furthermore be stressed that it is necessary to set an organization of production which does not allow to vary the program, since once the product is rehydrated it must be packaged quite immediately; on the other hand, there is no possibility of programming a short rehydration, due to the high number of hours required to obtain rehydration.
Trying to eliminate this disadvantage, machines have already been tested on the market which treat the product to be rehydrated with hot water, achieving, however, not fully satisfactory results in terms of the percentage of water absorbed by the dry product and in terms of the uniformity of the treatment, so that these machines have had no practical development.